Tasks, To-Do’s, and Goals in 2020

Every productive and successful person sets personal and work goals to achieve.  And the goals are always just slightly out of reach. If a goal is easy to achieve, it should never be a goal, rather it is more like a task.  I love this philosophy and process so much, that I decided to post a collection of my thoughts and how I view tasks, to-do’s, and goals. I hope this helps you set goals for the next decade, as this thought-process has changed my life. 

Most of us have tasks that need to be done. These are the items that we must accomplish to keep things moving along. For example, some tasks of a sales manager would be completing deals that need to become approved or approving discounts. If you are a doctor it is a patient to see and if you are an accountant it is a tax return to file. A task is never a goal and finishing a task is never accomplishing a goal.

A To-Do is something you want to get done or a thing someone wants you to do. Most of us have to-dos. This can be something like hiring a new accountant to file a tax return. Or it could be to fix a process that allows for sales to flow more smoothly. Finishing a to-do is not the same as hitting a goal.

I have items in all of these categories. I try very hard to make sure I don’t confuse them. I look at it like you would look at any hierarchy. 

All of my tasks must have something to do with one of my goals and all of my to-do’s should be part of a task.  I try to keep this straight and if a task or to-do comes into my life, I will ignore it if it isn’t something that I am working towards. I believe that this helps keep me on track.

Sometimes, tasks and to-dos just get left undone, these need to be erased. And maybe the goal needs to go away completely. If I am not working on it then it’s not a priority, so maybe it is something that I don’t really want to accomplish. Recently, we had a vendor let us know that we had to achieve a list of things by a specific date and if we failed, then we would lose our partnership. I looked at this situation and said, “you know, we are not really selling the product anyway so I think we should just walk away.” If we would have had a goal to sell the product, then it would have been a priority. However, we weren’t actively working on selling the product, so it made more sense to walk away. 

What if someone wants you to do something? Consider the example of hiring a competent roofer. I may not have had a direct goal to hire a roofer to fix my house, but my wife likes to stay dry. Because taking care of my wife and making her happy is one of my goals, I need to make and complete the to-do of hiring a competent roofer. I will gladly hire the roofer, because my wife is my priority. There are often some many times that we must take on tasks that we aren’t thinking about to help achieve an overall goal. We must be aware of those who we want to take care of, thus, we can’t be too rigid in our process.

I believe in good balanced goal setting. This means that I have business and personal goals constantly, and these goals together, should reflect how I spend my days. 

Get organized. The process is not difficult, it just takes diligence.